flamebait

[Haganham]

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=557803&start=450#p42104313

"Oh a thread about someone's pet being killed. I should post about killing these animals, and if that doesn't get a reaction I'll say it's for dog food." - someone who is totally not trying to bait, I'm sure.

[Kernen]

https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=557803&start=450#p42104313

"Oh a thread about someone's pet being killed. I should post about killing these animals, and if that doesn't get a reaction I'll say it's for dog food." - someone who is totally not trying to bait, I'm sure.

Adding here that at no point did I discuss using pet squirrels as dog food, as the record will reflect. This tangent evolved out of competing questions of the value of a squirrel in light of permissive bag limits when they're a game species.

I submit that an otherwise unpopular opinion on a squirrel's utility in response to an appeal to a squirrel's popularity is not flamebaiting.

[Fahran]

I'm leaning towards this not being actionable.

It's legal and not necessarily uncommon to hunt squirrels in the United States. Squirrels have also been and are still employed as raw dog food by some pet owners, though, notably, the efficacy of this practice remains very much in question - given the low probability of disease transmission from squirrels to dogs and lack of good studies in this area.

It's a bit unbecoming to bring up feeding squirrels to dogs in the context of a very popular pet squirrel being euthanized to conduct a test for rabies, but it doesn't really appear to constitute flame-baiting, since the owner of said pet squirrel is not a user on our site and "No, they don't" is not a prohibited counter-argument to the assertion that "Squirrel Lives Matter", a phrase with a decent amount of baggage on its own.

That said, the comments are definitely borderline and I would strongly suggest not trying to see how much we can rile people up by talking about hunting and dog food.